City Alki’s Lady Liberty
Sorry about the light Slogging—a virus or food poisoning or God’s divine vengeance knocked me out mid-day on Monday, and I’m only just now pulling my head out of the toilet. I won’t go into the gruesome details…
But I will jump in and make a comment about an item up on Seattlest…
Alki’s Lame Statuette of LibertyNot sure how often you make it out to Alki, but apparently there’s a tiny Statue of Liberty on the beach over there that’s falling apart. There’s a group of people trying to recast the thing in bronze and by the looks of their fundraising meter they’re almost there, but can we stop for a second and ask whether we can’t come up with something better than a tiny Statue of Liberty?
Isn’t there already one of these somewhere out east that’s, like, full size and meaningful and in fact connected with that city via the unbreakable bond of Ghostbusters II? Our little one seems kind of like the mini Stonehenge that drops down behind Spinal Tap in the movie. “The Northwest Program for the Arts would like to present to the city…Lady Liberty!” and two people step aside and there it is. Tiny and bronze and a copy of something that exists somewhere else. Do all of our statues have to be so kitchy?
I made it out to Alki twice last week, Seattlest. And while I agree that Seattle’s fifty-year-old Lady Liberty is small and kitchy, Seattle itself was a smaller, kitchier place back then. I don’t think the fact that New Yawk City has a bigger, older Lady Liberty isn’t a good reason to scrap our own. And isn’t there something meaningful about one Lady Liberty on the East Coast facing Europe and another on the West Coast facing Asia? (Now if we could only get one in, say, Texas facing Mexico and South America—and to hell with bronze, make that one out the bones of the Minutemen.) When you consider the United State’s long history of anti-Asian immigration policies (to say nothing of the internment of the Japanese), an east-facing Lady Liberty is that much more meaningful.
But it is too small—the scale is all wrong, it’s easy to miss, and it looks so fragile up there. While we’re raising money to re-cast Alki’s Lady Liberty in bronze, maybe we should go for broke and raise enough to have her re-cast at a respectable height, say 10’ or 12’.
And, finally, a link to the fine folks at CapitolHillSeattle —don’t want you guys to feel like we’re neglecting you.
Having lived for a number of years in West Seattle, I'd recommend no dissing of Lady Liberty West.
Yes, it's small. Yes, you have to work at it to find it. But it's held very dear to the hardcore folks in Alki and adjacent areas. And it's been around half past forever, surving at least two vandalism attempts I know of.
This is a fight detractors could never win.